Our Voice: Genesee County schools privatize for services at a greater rate, because they must

Either as a direct cost savings or as a bargaining chip in employee negotiations, privatization of school services is savings public districts a bundle.

In Genesee County, it’s working to bring down costs in a higher proportion of school districts than the statewide average, says the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in a recent report.

With public revenue for schools stagnant for years and now falling like a stone, calling on private companies to do work previously done by public employees for less money is a trend that’s good to see.

Even in a county such as ours, with a long and proud union background.

In Genesee County, 13 of the 21 school districts — 62 percent — contract with a private company to provide one of the three, main non-academic services in schools. They are custodial work, transportation and food service.

Statewide, 53.6 percent of schools contract with a company for one of the services, the Mackinac Center says.

Traditionally, that work has been done by employees that schools districts employ. Also traditionally, the school employees have unionized.

Neither of those traditions is necessarily bad.

What’s unhealthy for shrinking school budgets, though, is when districts try to continue these services themselves without cutting costs — when there are lower-cost alternatives for providing the services.

Enter private companies.

And the agonizing of most school boards and administrators over decisions to lay off entire custodial staffs, for example, to save money with a contractor.

We’ve seen school boards all across our part of Michigan go through the same struggle. They eye often enormous budget savings while the school employees who face layoff plead for their jobs.

Because of that interplay of emotions — people versus public budgets — privatization is obviously hard.

But the privatization discussion is necessary.

If the same service can be provided for less money, public entities owe it to their owners, the taxpayers, to seek the cost savings.

Saginaw Schools this summer saved $1 million by going with the lowest bid from several private companies for custodial service. That was despite pressure from school workers not to seek the outside service.

In Linden schools this year, the board delayed a vote on a custodial contract with a private company to give its custodial workers an opportunity to keep their jobs by giving up pay or benefits — concessions.

In the end, Linden schools went with a private contract, and aim to save $290,000 this school year. Custodial union cuts would have come in a distant second to that savings, with $72,000 in cuts.

It worked differently in Flint Schools this year, There, school officials were looking at a private contract for bus service. District bus drivers, though, countered with concessions saving the district money, and kept their jobs. The threat of privatization got the schools part of the enormous $25 million in budget cuts they needed this year.

Either way — concessions or private contracts — it shouldn’t matter to schools how they save their money. Getting the work done for the best price does.

It’s a cold, hard approach to the bottom line that Genesee County schools are taking in greater measure than the rest of the state.

That could be because our county has seen the bottom fall out of its public budgets — falling property values mean plummeting tax revenue locally — in greater measure than most other parts of the Great Lakes State.

Private companies offering to do public work for less money are bringing down the costs of these services.For public school employees and their unions, privatization means they have to compete. They have to meet the costs offered by the competition to keep their jobs.

It’s a dog-eat-dog reality of the working world, from which many public employees are no longer exempt.